How to use Twitter as an online marketing tool

Twitter is much more than a social media platform. Boasting around a billion users, Twitter is a platform you want to take advantage of for your marketing needs. Beyond simply being a tool to reach friends and family, Twitter helps you learn about your customers. Twitter is a great tool to help you share your message and grow your brand awareness.

Brand awareness: promote your product/service

Twitter is a great platform if you want to share your message and to promote your brand to an audience of savvy users.
The first thing to do is to enhance your profile. The key to success: be easy to find. For that you will need to add your company’s name or brand and a profile picture so users can recognize you. Take advantage of the URL field to direct visitors to your website. There you go: you just gained a new traffic source. You should also take advantage of the user bio and use hashtags to show up more easily in Twitter search results.

Next step: tell your story. With this online marketing tool, you will able to promote your message, you story, one tweet at a time. Make sure you follow the Rule of Thirds of social media: a third of the time, you should be talking about yourself – not more. Another third should be allocated to industry news, and the last third about interactions. While it may be tempting to talk solely about your brand, your audience will lose engagement quickly. No one likes egocentrics.

Connect with your audience: learn who they are and what they like

The power of Twitter comes with the possibility to connect people through hashtags. The idea of using hashtags was born in 2007 when Chris Messina suggested to use special keywords to facilitate conversations around a same topic. Hashtags are therefore clickable and allow people to find tweets related to a specific topic. By adding a hashtag to your tweet, users can easily have access to it. It is especially useful with trending news.

how do you feel about using # (pound) for groups. As in #barcamp [msg]?

Twitter chats also involve hashtags. It is a great way to get to know your audience and to connect with clients and prospects. When hosting a Twitter chat, make sure you choose a relavant hashtag, such as #marketingchat for a general topic or #bufferchat for a branded topic. Here is a great example of #bufferchat by Buffer on how to measure social ROI.

Offer deals and special promotions

With Twitter, you can delight your customers with special access to awesome deals. A few months ago, Twitter introduced cards, allowing you to make your tweets stand out and to add CTAs to interact with your audience. Let’s see how you can use these to offer special promotions to your followers. To do so, head to ads.twitter.com and sign up with your Twitter account. This is where you can access Twitter Analytics and many more features, such as advertising. Click on « Creatives » then « Cards ». There are different types of cards. Select website cards to create engaging CTAs. By creating a card with a CTA, your tweet stands out in user timelines. It also allows you to direct customers to the promotion page of your website, for example.

Grow your mailing list

Did you know Twitter also allows you to grow your mailing list by offering users to sign up to your newsletter? Just like with Website cards you can create Lead Generation cards. For example, here is DOZ’s. As you can see, the card asks me to share my email address with DOZ. That way I give my consent to have it added to their mailing list.
Lead generation cards are really easy to implement and you can create one through Twitter Ads to grow your emailing list.

To help you define your online marketing strategy on Twitter, take a look at this infographic to learn more about what users are expecting from brands and what you can do to improve your online presence.